This is the best study i know about digital media and adolescent wellbeing and they find an extremely small effect size (accounting for less than 0.4% of adolescent wellbeing).
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562%20018%200506%201?mod=...
This doesn't mean we shouldn't be concerned, especially if we are motivated to design better media culture. I can't stand Facebook.
No I don't think so.
I've played lots of first person shooters and it's harmless.
But social media causing damaging self worth worries, I slightly experience myself, sometimes. It's a real problem, in my eyes.
(Loot boxes, and computer gaming addiction, are real problems with the games though.)
I never saw such a game. -- The FPS games I've seen, I'd compare them more with looking at a ww2 movie.
"The last of us" -- that game maybe that one can cause, like you wrote, a bit desensitization. It's more realistic brutal violence in that game than what I saw in the games i played as a kid.
Any games come to your mind?
For sure I wouldn't want military or policemen to play such games, and not kids either
If social media as it stands causes unreasonable harm to society, how would we know for sure? And how would we know we aren’t making the same mistakes made with demonizing video games?
(https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4183915/)
Not only that but anyone that has used social media can say that to you, specially younger people.
Meanwhile studies show there was no correlation between violence and videogames. And except for lag you can't really find a lot of people that will tell you videogames made them violent. (https://www.psychologicalscience.org/publications/observer/o...)
There are many ways to regulate social media:
- Determine constraints and objective statistical goals the ranking algorithm must meet
- Blocking and marking fake content
etc.
Facebook could choose to rank positivity higher but it does the opposite since it increases engagement.
Do we actually have these, or are you inferring we do from the general tone of the media conversation around this topic? I'm aware of some correlation studies, and think the topic bears keeping an eye on.
Would you mind sharing one of the "quite a few" causal studies you're referring to?
> Hell a genocide happened because Facebook fell asleep at the wheel.
This is a non sequitur. Facebook didn't cause the genocide any more than Marconi caused the Rwandan genocide or AT&T caused Watergate. Widespread communications technologies and platforms are deeply fundamental to human interaction in the modern age; the only model that marks Facebook as at all causal of Rohingyan persecution requires giving them a nonsensical amount of undue credit for the human interaction that occurs across their platform. Eg, you'd have to make obviously absurd claims like that Facebook is responsible for legalizing gay marriage in the US (activists heavily use FB and other social media platforms to organize).
To be clear, I think criticism of FB from the UN et al on the topic of Myanmar is warranted. The nature of the platform is such that the capability can be built out to direct and constrain the conversations that are had, and it's fair to say that Facebook needs to expand the manner in which it does so.
But this contradicts your point: the salient difference is the ability to control communication so that it stops violence, which in your framing is a _positive_ of social media.
(Note that I'm personally close to an unrestricted speech maximalist, but I'm taking your framing for granted in the above paragraphs)
Again, eerily similar to the violent video game panic in the 90s.
The original congressional hearings on violence in video games followed record-high gun violence in 1993 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_congressional_hearings_on... ). Politicians pushed a correlation between increasing popularity of violent video games and increasing gun homicides. It sounds dumb now, but video games were relatively new at the time.
The correlation felt right to many, especially those who hadn't grown up with video games in their own lives. I see this social media debate following the same pattern where adults feel that social media is evil and assume evidence will eventually support their feelings.
> Because there is no evidence for this. In cases where there is, like in lootboxes, we see a push for legislation.
That's rewriting history. Decades ago, there was a huge push for legislation against violent video games long before lootboxes were a thing ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_congressional_hearings_on... )
Violent video games have been called out as recently as 2019 by president Trump ( https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/politics-news/trumps-... )
Violent video games have been a political scapegoat for decades. The debate about social media is following in the same footsteps.